Kairos Media, Inc.

"To celebrate Pride Winnipeg and because I don’t think I’ll find any better excuse to talk about it this post focuses on an incredibly specific detail of ad-tech minutiae. But my hope is that in doing so, this post can spark a few interesting questions and conversations about the role of gender in online advertising."

Reading through the details of Apple's "Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution":

"It isn’t the big brands who are being impacted most by ad fraud; it’s small to mid-sized businesses who see the largest share of their media budgets spent on fake impressions, generating fake interest from an audience of fake users"

Reading some of the industry buzz today, spotting headlines like AdAge’s Facebook Prepares Advertisers For When Users Clear History (or Mashable’s more dire Facebook Warns Advertisers: You Might Not Like ‘Clear History’), it can be tempting for online advertisers to feel like the sky might be falling. We’re here to tell you, the sky is *absolutely not falling*. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. Don’t get us wrong, what *is* happening in the coming months is still *a massive... deal* for Facebook advertisers, for a couple of reasons: First, because users of Facebook’s online platforms will (at long last) gain the ability to manage or clear any personal data collected from outside of its platforms, and used for the purposes of ad targeting. Second (and far more interestingly), Facebook seems to be signalling intent to expand on their Ads Transparency features first launched in mid-2018. Today’s blog-post stresses that a big component of [Clear History] is helping people understand how advertisers use our business tools, and advises any business advertising via Facebook to start thinking about ways to educate their customers about their marketing practices. That first bullet-point certainly has the potential to degrade the quality of data used when targeting/attributing ad campaigns via Facebook though likely no more so than the existing clear cookies functionality found in virtually all web browsers. That second point means that any advertiser who uses Facebook’s platforms (and really, are any of us *not* at this point?) should get comfortable with the prospect of showing their homework whenever they run a campaign. Facebook’s users and your prospective/current clients are gaining more and more visibility into which businesses target them with ads, what data those businesses used to target them, and why. The same could be said for the entire digital advertising ecosystem, as concerns over personal data and privacy have dominated conversations both inside the industry and beyond. So, no: the sky isn’t falling. But if the thought of explaining to your prospective clients exactly why they’ve seen your ads leaves a knot in your stomach, we should probably chat sometime.

Doing our part to get this line amended when the next StatsCan update comes out: "The digital economy also grew in every province and territory, except in three places Manitoba, Yukon and Nunavut it grew by less than the rest of the economy did."

Currently seeking topic suggestions for the Kairos blog -- got any burning questions about online marketing? If so, let me know! I wouldn't say that I've running *out* of blog topic ideas, but I'm curious to hear what others might be asking themselves lately about the industry. Plus, I'm not sure how compelling anyone (besides me) would find a post explaining in great detail how geo-targeting works in most online ad platforms vs. how it works in Google Analytics.

Manitoba’s election serves as a 'sneak preview' for how Facebook's new Ad Library feature might impact political advertising and campaign strategy in the federal contest which kicks off tomorrow. A few snap insights from the MB election that was:

"There are a number of ways that marketers can tend to treat conversions (and conversion rates) more as 'vanity' metrics than as 'actionable' ones. Here, I’ll be discussing a few of the more common examples that I’ve found in my own experience."

"Most 'cookie consent' banners aren't worth the time it took for a developer to add them to the website. Hell, they're not even worth the bandwidth your web browser uses to load them."

"For a disappointing number of digital marketing agencies including several right here in Winnipeg the potential for clients to lose access to their data isn’t a mistake. It’s an integral part of their business model." Read more: https://www.kairosmedia.ca//is-your-digital-marketing-age/

Because somebody out there needs to hear it this week:

"In 2019, adults in Canada will spend an average of 4 hours, 55 minutes on digital devices, compared with 4 hours, 54 minutes with traditional media, such as TV, radio and print." https://www.emarketer.com//time-spent-on-digital-in-canada For marketer reaction, we now go live to Troy Barnes. Troy?